The Different Facets of Love: That Make Us Human Beings

By Thérèse Nyetam

Why speak about love in all its facets? Love is a diamondwe cannot fathom its depths. By a combination of all its facets, we hope to reach a vision of true love. I realize that all people are looking for love so they can say life is beautiful. Love appears in different forms, different versions, different ages, and different cultures. It is present everywhere, but transparent, like wind and water. Could it be an element of nature that feeds us daily? Everybody knows that when we fall in love, we just need fresh water to survive. Love is the word we use the most to express a feeling of satisfaction. We use it more to express our personal sensations than those inspired in somebody else. This is not our fault; we are taught growing up to hide our feelings and say things halfway, so as not to shock. Thats what it means to live in community.
Society attempts to control people who have chosen to live inside itto control loveby imposing rules that restrict behavior. Sex is one of its priorities. In the olden days, homosexuality was a normal sexual behavior; it was tolerated. At the time of Kings, incest was accepted. Each period imposes sexual taboos, and as a consequence, nowadays we live with so many taboos we dont understand them in depth. To my mind, taboos are designed to manage the general interest and safeguard society. I also think that they have to arise themselves from a loving sentiment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481789080

Book preview

Contents

The soul’s purity is the man’s wisdom.

The Strength of Love Can Be Felt Only with the Total Knowledge of Its Different Facets

Square 7 Life

Square 13 Death

Square 8 Friendship

Square 10 Oasis

26 Everlasting

The key to happiness is inside all of us.

The Moral of the Game

Love

Yes, I love with a deep feeling that I cannot define.

This love bites, laughs, and cries inside me at the same time.

I live in a slow world without knowing where I am going.

It is the first time that I have loved,

And I know that each thing must have a beginning and an end to be experienced.

Is it the end of a blinding love? Maybe!

I don’t know what I can say except that my heart is full of love,

My eyes are full of tears that just want to slide off my chubby cheeks.

Why love until death?

Is it this kind of love that involves a destructive part of the loving to express itself totally?

Must we inevitably wander, fight, and avoid each other after touching, kissing, and loving?

Why does the human being set for himself a lot of boundaries to the most fulfilling feeling that he knows?

Love!

Because love is just a fully complex dialogue within the whole body.

It speaks, sings, cries, with the help of another.

But the problem is that love is not stated in a universal dialogue.

Each human being has his own;

With chance or by his destiny, he will meet someone who could understand him.

However, understanding is impossible, maybe because of different cultures, some opposed qualities and values.

In these kinds of circumstances, must love go beyond to rise, or must it isolate itself, hide away dying by inches?

Love is the hardest of the experiences that I have met up to now.

Now I can affirm that nothing is harder that love,

Because love, to be known, requests a physical competence of another person who will be inside this relationship, the superior, the inferior, an equal partner, a reflection on the mirror.

Nevertheless, does the last one really exist?

The likeness is a double image; at first sight, we can see us inside the loving being.

But at a second glance, the loving being reflects our image.

Many people think that those who look alike are made to live together, but many of them also think that the contraries catch each other.

Who is right, who is put on a pedestal?

For me, I think that love is a feeling that must be lived for what it is—a pure feeling that cannot be defined by man because man didn’t create it.

We must accept it without wanting to change it.

Let it express on the loving person’s face the goodness flower, because only love guides us on the path to goodness.

October 2001, Thérèse Nyetam

The soul’s purity

is the man’s wisdom.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

—William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (I/i)

The Strength of Love Can Be Felt

Only with the Total Knowledge

of Its Different Facets

Why speak about love in all its facets? Love is a diamond—we cannot fathom its depths. By a combination of all its facets, we hope to reach a vision of true love. I realize that all people are looking for love so they can say life is beautiful. Love appears in different forms, different versions, different ages, and different cultures. It is present everywhere, but transparent, like wind and water. Could it be an element of nature that feeds us daily? Everybody knows that when we fall in love, we just need fresh water to survive. Love is the word we use the most to express a feeling of satisfaction. We use it more to express our personal sensations than those inspired in somebody else. This is not our fault; we are taught growing up to hide our feelings and say things halfway, so as not to shock. That’s what it means to live in community.

Society attempts to control people who have chosen to live inside it—to control love—by imposing rules that restrict behavior. Sex is one of its priorities. In the olden days, homosexuality was a normal sexual behavior; it was tolerated. At the time of Kings, incest was accepted. Each period imposes sexual taboos, and as a consequence, nowadays we live with so many taboos we don’t understand them in depth. To my mind, taboos are designed to manage the general interest and safeguard society. I also think that they have to arise themselves from a loving sentiment.

Individual interest must always come before general interest. What would society be without individuals? They are its raw material. As we know, each rule has an exception. We are inclined to wonder if love is not the best exception against a taboo. When love is not an obstacle to the evolution mankind, why forbid it? Before imposing a way of life, we need to open our minds to understand cultural diversity. Taboos are necessary to constrain man’s perversity, but in the end, we would go straight to chaos if we tried to prevent everything.

If all men and women were made of the same material, everything would be easier, but in reality, each human being is different, and that is the whole problem. We have to take into consideration the feelings of everybody (because it takes all kinds of people to make a world) to provide for the next generation a proposed ranking of feelings, good or bad. Each of us creates a pure notion of love and imposes individual conditions and boundaries in favor of the general interest—to start from scratch, put away the prejudices, the bitterness, the complications that are the sources of our heartaches, and to integrate daily the prime notion of love. Under love in the Encarta World English dictionary, we read, to feel tender affection for somebody, e.g., a close relative or friend, or for something such as a place, an ideal, or an animal. I am sure that without this imposition, the general interest would be preserved and present in the mind of most.

Love can be tasted, touched, felt, and spoken. It has crossed the centuries in spite of the restrictions imposed by man; it has accompanied him in his evolution. Like a storm, it makes trouble anywhere it passes. Its invisibility provides certain advantages—it cannot be counted and made to wear a color. Anyone can appropriate it. Now I understand why so many people see the issue of humanity in love. Native Americans, as primitives, were carriers of this love. Primitive people are thought to lack comfort, yet they possess the most magical of accommodations, as nature marvelously manages their needs. It is the most beautiful present from Mother Earth. Only a few people stay attached to her—the best served and the most cherished. What is better than being held by mother from birth to death? Nothing in the human world could change or give more than her. She is for all the first witness and support. Why are we promoting her destruction? Why don’t we show her the respect that she by right expects? She will stay our mother forever. Don’t forget that without her, we are nothing.

When I went to Cameroon for the first time, I felt immediate harmony with nature. I was baptized by my first African bath in the river of my mother’s village. It was the most beautiful present my mother could give me—coming back to my source. What followed left me speechless. My sisters and I were awakened by our mother in the middle of the night to admire the most beautiful scene offered by nature—the gleam of a full moon. It was a gift from the sky, which has allowed me since to see nature anywhere, even in the city, breathing it for the rest of my life to let my wild side live, my natural passions. This marvelous gift was given to me for my sixteenth birthday, just before a new step into high school. After seeing this, nothing in the material world can impress me. I know that everyone has a background, but it is not always close to nature. The farther we stray from Mother Earth, the farther our natural feelings are. Love is the heart of the source of wisdom that permits us to understand the world around us and acquire peace next to the Great Spirit.

The research I did for my master’s degree thesis, entitled Law and Religion inside the Cheyenne Tribe, looked at Aristotle’s conception of politicians and compared it with the Cheyenne’s. How the politician was represented by the chief who planned the life of the tribe has contributed to my vision of the world. The tribe’s culture, religion, and rules are so impregnated with wisdom and love for one’s neighbor. Therefore, I cannot understand why up until now we haven’t listened to them! Maybe because they retained the only weapon against capitalism: natural love. Yet Aristotle offered the same wisdom. In his different works merged a power of words that can only be understood by giving your whole heart and soul. Aristotle wrote: The virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happen in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g., men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.¹

If I quote Aristotle, it is because he knew the nature of man like the Cheyenne. Although man possesses loving feelings, he is not in a love situation if he does not want to be inside it. From Aristotle, we learn and understand the necessity of practice. By practicing things, man improves himself. But from my point of view, the practice refers to another quality: will. As philosopher, William Kaufman wrote of Nietzsche: "The will to power is thus not only the devil who diverts man from achieving culture, or a psychological urge that helps to explain diverse and complex types of human behavior. Political and cultural achievements, art and philosophy are thus to be explained in terms of the will to power… Only in Zarathustra is the will of power proclaimed as the basic force underlying all human activities…"² Everybody has the capacity to do things, but few people do them. Therefore, doing many things implies the power of will has been concretely realized. Will is the quality that puts the first primordial brick on the foundation. Will is also the booster of another thing: love. We need it to get in the game.

But in the game of love, we have to summon up other trump cards to moderate our passions. The cards that I have chosen to integrate in my game are the virtues that Aristotle described in his book The ethics of Aristotle. He defines virtue as a middle state between two faulty ones—excess on one side and defect on the other, one that falls short of virtue and one that exceeds what is right. In both cases, feelings are in action; when a just middle is found, this is called virtue. These virtual cards spice up the game, making it more captivating. Discover the eleven trumps before starting the game to know what we are engaged when we pretend to be in love:

1. Courage: In love, we must have the courage to say no or stop a relationship when it is too much. Saying no is one of the big marks of courage. For Aristotle, the courageous man is either absent of fear or full of confidence. He is located between the rash man and the coward. The man who qualifies as courageous doesn’t fight all fears, because all evils are not worth being afraid of.

2. Self-Mastery: This virtue uses pleasure rationally; it involves being selective with the pleasures of the body. Self-mastery is not located between two vices. The defect is comparable to a total absence of self-control. People who express this vice can be called insensible.

3. Liberality: In my opinion, this is the perfect coalition: First, we can give what we have. Second, when we give something, we have to keep more on our side if we want to give again (fluctuation law). Third, we need to be detached from what we give so as to have no regrets afterward. For Nietzsche³, liberality is often only a form of timidity in the rich. For Aristotle, liberality was located between the excess prodigality and the defect stinginess.

4. Munificence: Yes, love must be shown in its best clothes, as a rose on a beautiful summer night: a star in the dimmer. The munificent, driven by the same reason as the liberal, must follow two rules to achieve his sumptuous purchases: proportion and convenience. Moreover, in the hope of improving things, he is interested in beauty and the great finality without worrying about shoestrings. The excess is called by the name of want of taste or "vulgar